The original “Doctor Death”

During the 1700’s, executions in France were public events where entire towns gathered to watch. A common execution method for a poor criminal was quartering, where the prisoner’s limbs were tied to four oxen, then the animals were driven in four different directions ripping the person apart. Upper-class criminals could buy their way into a less painful death by hanging or beheading.

Doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin actually belonged to a small political reform movement that wanted to banish the death penalty completely. Guillotin argued for a painless and private capital punishment method equal for all the classes, as an interim step towards completely banning the death penalty.

Beheading devices had already been used in Germany, Italy, Scotland and Persia for aristocratic criminals. However, never had such a device been adopted on a large institutional scale. The French named the guillotin after Doctor Guillotin. The extra ‘e’ at the end of the word was added by an unknown English poet who found guillotine easier to rhythm with.

Doctor Guillotin together with German engineer and harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt, built the prototype for an ideal guillotine machine. It was Schmidt who suggested using a diagonal blade instead of a round blade.

The French Revolution began in 1789, the year of the famous storming of the Bastille. On July 14 of the same year, King Louis XVI of France was driven from the French throne and sent into exile. The new civilian assembly rewrote the penal code to say, “Every person condemned to the death penalty shall have his head severed.” All classes of people were now executed equally. The first guillotining took place on April 25, 1792, when Nicolas Jacques Pelletie was guillotined at Place de Grève on the Right Bank. Ironically, Louis XVI had his own head chopped off on January 21, 1793. Thousands of people were publicly guillotined during the French Revolution.

On September 10, 1977, the last execution by guillotine took place in Marseilles, France, when the murderer Hamida Djandoubi was beheaded.